I'll refrain from saying "moderate that guy's post up!". Er. I did. Sorry, lemming heritage...
Anyway, while I basically agree with you--I think that both you and the other people are right. My opinion: most of the real cruelty and ostracization happens in elementary school and/or middle school. In high school, especially after freshman/sophomore year, most of the populace is mature enough to realize that continually pyschologically savaging people is a fairly worthless activity. The problem is that (a) some don't, especially athletes (I'm not sure why athletes particularly) and (b) the former victims of attacks have become so used to being picked on that they have developed an 'Us vs Them' mentality and extremely thin skins. Believe me, when you spend several years of your life--that's like a quarter when you're that young--being ridiculed because you believe what people say ("Want some fruit PUNCH?"), you're much less likely to trust people easily. (of course this makes for a great future career in literary analysis but I digress...) In addition, hypersensitivity means that if there are one or two jerks on the football team who like to beat up kids after school, this can turn into "the school is run by jocks" Not to say that it isn't bad--but it's easy to convince yourself that the actions of a few idiots are representative of the whole group, especially if you're used to things being that way. Probably most of the isolation in high school, IMO, is fallout and scars from earlier years. And of course I suppose there'll always be a few edge cases, where the school really is that immature.
Of course, maybe I just got lucky by going to a public high school that worked..
Kids raised in interactive environments - with zappers, Nintendos, computers, sophisticated games - complain that they sometimes struggle in environments where adults stand for hours droning at them about passive things. This doesn't mean they are dumb, just different. Their digital world is much more vital, colorful and engaging that their educational one.
...I'm not really sure that requiring everything to come with flashing lights and sound effects is really a Good Thing[tm]. That doesn't mean that teachers shouldn't try to get the students *interested* in the subject but I've been in classes that were incredibly informative and fascinating even though the teacher was doing nothing but lecture. I don't mean to be defending bad teaching--but not everything in life has to be exciting. Yes?
As a general rule, I'd suggest that people learn to appreciate things that aren't 'entertaining' in the sense it's used today--ie, conducive to a state of overstimulation.
Daniel
PS - I'm in my first year of college right now so I do have recent experience on the student-end of things. And my teaching is terrible, even people who want to understand me fall asleep.:-P It's why I'm never going to be a teacher..
Re:No, HotSpot produces faster code than C or C++
on
The Desktop Wars
·
· Score: 1
Java is far easier to write a GUI for than those outdated languages: This statement makes me wonder whether you've used both Java and GTK+. I find it to be easier to write a GUI in *C* using GTK+ than Java, which is ridiculous--a real OO language ought to be better at this. Swing's API is simply too baroque; it makes it possible to do a few complicated things 'simply' (for small values of simple:-/ ) but it's not worth the price of making *everything* complex.
and will work on all platforms including Windows, BeOS and Macintosh - platforms that Gtk+ and KDE don't support.
As far as I know, GTK+ supports Windows and will soon support BeOS. I doubt that the desktop environments would work too well under these systems, but that's partly because they already have proprietary desktop environments and replacing them is non-trivial.
What features does KDE/GNOME offer that Java doesn't already have? Nothing.
The fact that they're both based on sane languages? The fact that their APIs aren't baroque to the point of incomprehensibility? The fact that they aren't bogged down by a virtual machine? The fact that I don't feel like tearing my hair out in handfuls every time I sit down to use GTK+? (Swing produces this reaction)
The only reasons to use Java are: (a) You want your program to run on multiple platforms but don't want to release the source. (b) Web applets, where you want to distribute a compiled version of the program
Of the two..I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for (a) and unless you're suggesting that we should move to only using web-page applets, I don't think (b) applies.
Anyone know when it's going to come out? All the stuff I've read about it is cool, but as far as I know it's going to be released next 30th of February..
I'm sure they won't preinstall them, that would be too much to hope for, but will Dell let us get OS-less PCs, or are we going to see people heading to RedHat for refunds on their distro?:-/
We can make a support group for People for Whom High School Was Not a Living Hell.:-)
[don't ask me about elementary school or junior high, though.. ]
To everyone: Not all public schools are broken. I've been to one where things mostly worked. Imperfect? Yes. Everything is. And I don't know how long things will stay that way (there were signs of decay even my senior year), but that does not negate the fact that for a time they worked and worked well.
I would probably jump at the chance to redo senior year, junior year..maybe even sophmore year. Is there anyone else there who..even if they weren't class president..wasn't shoved into lockers and wasn't shoved into lockers just for hanging out with computers more than people?
It probably wouldn't have mattered, about all the information they gave about Debian is 'here's Debian, it's maintained by volunteers, it has a package manager'. That holds for 2.1 or 2.0. For whatever reason, they didn't want to say anything about Debian if they could avoid it.
Ummm, Debian lets you do installs from just about anything you can mount or from FTP/HTTP (in fact just about every system I installed has been via FTP) In fact, the network installs have been improved at the expense of more 'traditional' methods (especially CD-ROM installs, see another thread on this topic for more on that).
That said, I agree that the previous comment was overly inflammatory. I haven't personally installed RedHat, so I probably should keep my mouth shut about it.:-) My main impression is from hanging out on gnome-list and hearing both myriad complaints from people who broke their systems in ways that Debian would at least not encourage (apparently enough RPMs are broken that --force --no-deps is usually required) or are requesting features that have been in Debian forever, (such as menu integration--this is really a huge convenience, especially if you're like me and install/uninstall stuff on a continual basis--or a program to automatically find, download, install, and upgrade programs for you) I think that there are RedHat programs that provide some of those features some of the time, but they don't seem to be nearly as well advertised or supported as the Debian equivalents..and (eg) a menu generator that doesn't get to generate menus is kinda useless.
I really shouldn't say anything about the GTK+ cheap shots. BUT--
GTK+ has inheritence. However, it's almost never necessary to use it. The object system itself has a number of features that other such systems don't necessarily have (like the ability to store arbitrarily keyed data on any object, or the ability to override the member functions for a single instance, essentially creating a one-member class) It's not a C++ object system but C++ isn't really the be-all and end-all of languages (although it's pretty good a lot of the time). [ it's also worth noting that in, eg, Python, using Python's inheritence mechanisms works perfectly with GTK+ objects--maybe a bad example though, since a lot of GTK+'s object mechanisms seem to be similar to Pythons to start with ]
I haven't found anything yet that GTK+ was particularly bad for. Now, I've seen poorly written (albeit working) GTK+ programs [gnomeicu comes to mind] but I can go write a bad Qt app too.:-) The only real problem with GTK+, perhaps, is that it gives an OO system to people (C programmers) who often don't seem to know what to do with it. Some of the code I've seen would make you cringe...
1. in dselect, option 0 [Access] mounts the CDROM. then, when you go on to option 1 [Update], it wants to mount the CDROM elsewhere, and fails, because it is already mounted. This is Debian 2.1 by the way. It doesn't happen after the initial install process, but it does happen the first time dselect comes up when installing.
Yeah, that's a bug.
2. dselect has more than once skipped over packages I told it to install. *boggle*
What install method were you using? Did it give you error messages? Apt will ignore attempts to install things that would leave the system in a broken state (I think there may be a forcing option..I never have a reason to use it)
3. I don't recall telling Debian to make X start automatically and unkillable on bootup, but it decided to do it anyways.
You mean that you installed xdm? Have you tried '/etc/init.d/xdm stop' or 'dpkg --remove xdm'? [ hmm, perhaps this *should* be a question in dbootstrap somewhere.. ]
I think that the problem is not in general that there are so many packages available, but that so many of them require user input during install. Too many decisions to make on too little data (often it's not even obvious what the program that's prompting you *is*)
Ok, I should mention ahead of time that I am a Debian user and that I personally am of the opinion that Debian is potentially the most user-friendly distribution. Bias aside:
User-friendliness pros:
- almost everything is automated. Package upgrading, documentation, menu systems, cronjobs, init scripts, MIME type handlers,... [ I won't bore you with a complete list ] Packages Work[tm] when you install them, 95% of the time at least, and install any necessary extra configuration. If they don't it's a bug.
- cool bug-tracking system which lets you get directly to the maintainer of the package. It's nice knowing that someone is actually listening when you find a problem.
..umm..that's it..the first one in particular, though, is a rather large topic; most of the more annoying aspects of installing programs and integrating them into the system are handled for you.
Cons:
- install process. The problem is not that it's ugly, the problem is that when it installs packages, it doesn't tell them that they're being installed as part of a new Debian installation. The result is that a lot of software (which the user might not even remember installing--what's 'gom'?? ) asks questions--not many, just one or two (like "should I start this on bootup") which the user may not have enough information to answer. This is perfectly OK when installing a program or two on a running system, but I've seen experienced Linux users beaten into submission after the 300th program asked them to configure a minor detail of its operation.
- dselect. Too easy for someone to screw their system up with a typo (I've seen people--again, experienced Linux users--fight with dselect. It works, sorta, once you're used to it, but most of the nastiness is gratuitous)
I have a possible solution to the first one..but it's not finished yet and I don't want to post the URL here lest my computer die a horrible death.:-) It's on freshmeat though. The intrepid may be able to find it that way. It's basically a sane way to create installation/configuration scripts that can work in any environment. I call it a dialog replacement but it aims for quite a bit more. The second problem is being addressed by apt.
Umm..there are official Debian Gnome packages, check out http://www.debian.org/~jim/debian-gtk-gnome.
The packages are obviously still provisional, but they Work For Me[tm]..I finally dropped CVS builds last week for debs. No problems to report (except for gdm, which insists on starting the X server twice after I log out..) .
I thought Twain said that. Or maybe they were both quoting a third party?
Daniel
"If you pick up a starving dog and give him food, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." -- this is Twain, I'm sure. Fortune sayeth so.:-)
Do you know if there are any plans to upgrade them past 1.0.3? I've considered dropping CVS for.debs from time to time but the fact that the snapshots seem to be rather static put me off (thus putting more load on the poor CVS servers.:-) OTOH, it means that my hack to make the life applet randomize every 15 minutes stays in...)
) Linux is not a GNU/FSF project. Linus created the kernel and should get full credit.
Linux is not GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is.:-) GNU/Linux refers to the operating system that you get when you compile GNU software for Linux.
GNU/Linux is an unwieldy name, Linux is much shorter and pithier.
I agree there. I use GNU/Linux in writing but I don't think I've ever said it.
The GNU part of the name describes command line tools and not the actual operating system.
...but every operating system based on Linux contains the GNU utilities and *requires* them to boot. Before you yell 'replace them', wait..
The name GNU/Linux is not future-proof because the GNU-written tools may eventually be replaced by others (like the Perl project).
Ok. Replace GNU fileutils with Perl fileutils, GNU shellutils with Perl shellutils, GNU libc with Perl libc, etc. Then you can call your computer Perlutils/Linux. BSD/Linux is another option, of course.
The reason he calls it GNU/Linux is that the GNU project set out to build and collect the software necessary to create a totally free operating system. He wants it to be called GNU/Linux not because Linux is GNU software but because most Linux distributions are essentially distributions of the GNU operating system. I personally wish that when he heard of Linux he had gotten together with Linus and announced that Linux was GNU's first official kernel and the world now had a free operating system. Evidently no-one (including Linus) really expected the kernel to get as useful as it has and the GNU project wanted (among other things) portability to every hardware setup under the sun and a cooler design (hence the Hurd).
Besides, it's possible to replace most of the GNU stuff in the OS (gcc is part of the OE), with BSD tools - all of their stuff may eventually be replaced, so calling it GNU/Linux wouldn't be futureproof.
Actually, if someone made a distro using the BSD tools, the argument for GNU/Linux would be even stronger because we'd have to tell it apart from BSD/Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
(really, what truly GREAT innovations have been made in FPS
games since DOOM?)
Jedi Knight? Hmm, might not qualify as 'great', but certainly significant.
they are easy to use and look pretty. (don't laugh.. that's what most techies judge OSes on)
You mean non-techies, right? Please tell me you meant non-techies...
Daniel
I'll refrain from saying "moderate that guy's post up!". Er. I did. Sorry, lemming heritage...
Anyway, while I basically agree with you--I think that both you and the other people are right. My opinion: most of the real cruelty and ostracization happens in elementary school and/or middle school. In high school, especially after freshman/sophomore year, most of the populace is mature enough to realize that continually pyschologically savaging people is a fairly worthless activity. The problem is that (a) some don't, especially athletes (I'm not sure why athletes particularly) and (b) the former victims of attacks have become so used to being picked on that they have developed an 'Us vs Them' mentality and extremely thin skins. Believe me, when you spend several years of your life--that's like a quarter when you're that young--being ridiculed because you believe what people say ("Want some fruit PUNCH?"), you're much less likely to trust people easily. (of course this makes for a great future career in literary analysis but I digress...) In addition, hypersensitivity means that if there are one or two jerks on the football team who like to beat up kids after school, this can turn into "the school is run by jocks" Not to say that it isn't bad--but it's easy to convince yourself that the actions of a few idiots are representative of the whole group, especially if you're used to things being that way. Probably most of the isolation in high school, IMO, is fallout and scars from earlier years. And of course I suppose there'll always be a few edge cases, where the school really is that immature.
Of course, maybe I just got lucky by going to a public high school that worked..
Daniel
Kids raised in interactive environments - with zappers, Nintendos,
...I'm not really sure that requiring everything to come with flashing lights and sound effects is really a Good Thing[tm]. That doesn't mean that teachers shouldn't try to get the students *interested* in the subject but I've been in classes that were incredibly informative and fascinating even though the teacher was doing nothing but lecture. I don't mean to be defending bad teaching--but not everything in life has to be exciting. Yes?
:-P It's why I'm never going to be a teacher..
computers, sophisticated games - complain that they sometimes struggle in
environments where adults stand for hours droning at them about passive
things. This doesn't mean they are dumb, just different. Their digital world
is much more vital, colorful and engaging that their educational one.
As a general rule, I'd suggest that people learn to appreciate things that aren't 'entertaining' in the sense it's used today--ie, conducive to a state of overstimulation.
Daniel
PS - I'm in my first year of college right now so I do have recent experience on the student-end of things. And my teaching is terrible, even people who want to understand me fall asleep.
Java is far easier to write :-/ ) but it's not worth the price of making *everything* complex.
a GUI for than those outdated languages:
This statement makes me wonder whether you've used both Java and GTK+. I find it to be easier to write a GUI in *C* using GTK+ than Java, which is ridiculous--a real OO language ought to be better at this. Swing's API is simply too baroque; it makes it possible to do a few complicated things 'simply' (for small values of simple
and will work on all platforms including
Windows, BeOS and Macintosh - platforms that Gtk+ and KDE don't support.
As far as I know, GTK+ supports Windows and will soon support BeOS. I doubt that the desktop environments would work too well under these systems, but that's partly because they already have proprietary desktop environments and replacing them is non-trivial.
Daniel
What features does KDE/GNOME offer that Java doesn't already have? Nothing.
The fact that they're both based on sane languages? The fact that their APIs aren't baroque to the point of incomprehensibility? The fact that they aren't bogged down by a virtual machine? The fact that I don't feel like tearing my hair out in handfuls every time I sit down to use GTK+? (Swing produces this reaction)
The only reasons to use Java are:
(a) You want your program to run on multiple platforms but don't want to release the source.
(b) Web applets, where you want to distribute a compiled version of the program
Of the two..I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for (a) and unless you're suggesting that we should move to only using web-page applets, I don't think (b) applies.
Daniel
Anyone know when it's going to come out? All the stuff I've read about it is cool, but as far as I know it's going to be released next 30th of February..
Daniel
To keyboard-select in (X)Emacs, you hit C-Space..
Daniel
I'm sure they won't preinstall them, that would be too much to hope for, but will Dell let us get OS-less PCs, or are we going to see people heading to RedHat for refunds on their distro? :-/
Daniel
We can make a support group for People for Whom High School Was Not a Living Hell. :-)
[don't ask me about elementary school or junior high, though.. ]
To everyone: Not all public schools are broken. I've been to one where things mostly worked. Imperfect? Yes. Everything is. And I don't know how long things will stay that way (there were signs of decay even my senior year), but that does not negate the fact that for a time they worked and worked well.
I would probably jump at the chance to redo senior year, junior year..maybe even sophmore year. Is there anyone else there who..even if they weren't class president..wasn't shoved into lockers and wasn't shoved into lockers just for hanging out with computers more than people?
Daniel
It probably wouldn't have mattered, about all the information they gave about Debian is 'here's Debian, it's maintained by volunteers, it has a package manager'. That holds for 2.1 or 2.0. For whatever reason, they didn't want to say anything about Debian if they could avoid it.
Daniel
Ummm, Debian lets you do installs from just about anything you can mount or from FTP/HTTP (in fact just about every system I installed has been via FTP) In fact, the network installs have been improved at the expense of more 'traditional' methods (especially CD-ROM installs, see another thread on this topic for more on that).
:-) My main impression is from hanging out on gnome-list and hearing both myriad complaints from people who broke their systems in ways that Debian would at least not encourage (apparently enough RPMs are broken that --force --no-deps is usually required) or are requesting features that have been in Debian forever, (such as menu integration--this is really a huge convenience, especially if you're like me and install/uninstall stuff on a continual basis--or a program to automatically find, download, install, and upgrade programs for you) I think that there are RedHat programs that provide some of those features some of the time, but they don't seem to be nearly as well advertised or supported as the Debian equivalents..and (eg) a menu generator that doesn't get to generate menus is kinda useless.
That said, I agree that the previous comment was overly inflammatory. I haven't personally installed RedHat, so I probably should keep my mouth shut about it.
Daniel
I really shouldn't say anything about the GTK+ cheap shots. BUT--
:-) The only real problem with GTK+, perhaps, is that it gives an OO system to people (C programmers) who often don't seem to know what to do with it. Some of the code I've seen would make you cringe...
GTK+ has inheritence. However, it's almost never necessary to use it. The object system itself has a number of features that other such systems don't necessarily have (like the ability to store arbitrarily keyed data on any object, or the ability to override the member functions for a single instance, essentially creating a one-member class) It's not a C++ object system but C++ isn't really the be-all and end-all of languages (although it's pretty good a lot of the time). [ it's also worth noting that in, eg, Python, using Python's inheritence mechanisms works perfectly with GTK+ objects--maybe a bad example though, since a lot of GTK+'s object mechanisms seem to be similar to Pythons to start with ]
I haven't found anything yet that GTK+ was particularly bad for. Now, I've seen poorly written (albeit working) GTK+ programs [gnomeicu comes to mind] but I can go write a bad Qt app too.
Daniel
1. in dselect, option 0 [Access] mounts the CDROM. then, when you go on to option 1 [Update], it
wants to mount the CDROM elsewhere, and fails, because it is already mounted. This is Debian
2.1 by the way. It doesn't happen after the initial install process, but it does happen the first time
dselect comes up when installing.
Yeah, that's a bug.
2. dselect has more than once skipped over packages I told it to install.
*boggle*
What install method were you using? Did it give you error messages?
Apt will ignore attempts to install things that would leave the system in a broken state (I think there may be a forcing option..I never have a reason to use it)
3. I don't recall telling Debian to make X start automatically and unkillable on bootup, but it
decided to do it anyways.
You mean that you installed xdm? Have you tried '/etc/init.d/xdm stop' or 'dpkg --remove xdm'? [ hmm, perhaps this *should* be a question in dbootstrap somewhere.. ]
I think that the problem is not in general that there are so many packages available, but that so many of them require user input during install. Too many decisions to make on too little data (often it's not even obvious what the program that's prompting you *is*)
Daniel
Ok, I should mention ahead of time that I am a Debian user and that I personally am of the opinion that Debian is potentially the most user-friendly distribution. Bias aside:
... [ I won't bore you with a complete list ] Packages Work[tm] when you install them, 95% of the time at least, and install any necessary extra configuration. If they don't it's a bug.
..umm..that's it..the first one in particular, though, is a rather large topic; most of the more annoying aspects of installing programs and integrating them into the system are handled for you.
:-) It's on freshmeat though. The intrepid may be able to find it that way. It's basically a sane way to create installation/configuration scripts that can work in any environment. I call it a dialog replacement but it aims for quite a bit more. The second problem is being addressed by apt.
User-friendliness pros:
- almost everything is automated. Package upgrading, documentation, menu systems, cronjobs, init scripts, MIME type handlers,
- cool bug-tracking system which lets you get directly to the maintainer of the package. It's nice knowing that someone is actually listening when you find a problem.
Cons:
- install process. The problem is not that it's ugly, the problem is that when it installs packages, it doesn't tell them that they're being installed as part of a new Debian installation. The result is that a lot of software (which the user might not even remember installing--what's 'gom'?? ) asks questions--not many, just one or two (like "should I start this on bootup") which the user may not have enough information to answer. This is perfectly OK when installing a program or two on a running system, but I've seen experienced Linux users beaten into submission after the 300th program asked them to configure a minor detail of its operation.
- dselect. Too easy for someone to screw their system up with a typo (I've seen people--again, experienced Linux users--fight with dselect. It works, sorta, once you're used to it, but most of the nastiness is gratuitous)
I have a possible solution to the first one..but it's not finished yet and I don't want to post the URL here lest my computer die a horrible death.
Daniel
Hasn't this been hashed out hundreds of times on these pages already?
Daniel
Umm..there are official Debian Gnome packages, check out http://www.debian.org/~jim/debian-gtk-gnome.
The packages are obviously still provisional, but they Work For Me[tm]..I finally dropped CVS builds last week for debs. No problems to report (except for gdm, which insists on starting the X server twice after I log out..) .
Daniel
Gates supports Linux as a desktop OS. Hell just froze over.
Daniel
I thought Twain said that. Or maybe they were both quoting a third party?
:-)
Daniel
"If you pick up a starving dog and give him food, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." -- this is Twain, I'm sure. Fortune sayeth so.
Do you know if there are any plans to upgrade them past 1.0.3? I've considered dropping CVS for .debs from time to time but the fact that the snapshots seem to be rather static put me off (thus putting more load on the poor CVS servers. :-) OTOH, it means that my hack to make the life applet randomize every 15 minutes stays in...)
Daniel
) Linux is not a GNU/FSF project. Linus created the kernel and should get full credit.
:-) GNU/Linux refers to the operating system that you get when you compile GNU software for Linux.
...but every operating system based on Linux contains the GNU utilities and *requires* them to boot. Before you yell 'replace them', wait..
Linux is not GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is.
GNU/Linux is an unwieldy name, Linux is much shorter and pithier.
I agree there. I use GNU/Linux in writing but I don't think I've ever said it.
The GNU part of the name describes command line tools and not the actual operating system.
The name GNU/Linux is not future-proof because the GNU-written tools may eventually be
replaced by others (like the Perl project).
Ok. Replace GNU fileutils with Perl fileutils, GNU shellutils with Perl shellutils, GNU libc with Perl libc, etc. Then you can call your computer Perlutils/Linux. BSD/Linux is another option, of course.
Daniel
No. They don't. They just need X code to boot X correctly. Unless the sysadmin screwed up the boot scripts. :-)
Daniel
Freeciv should compile on LinuxPPC AFAIK.
Daniel
The reason he calls it GNU/Linux is that the GNU project set out to build and collect the software necessary to create a totally free operating system. He wants it to be called GNU/Linux not because Linux is GNU software but because most Linux distributions are essentially distributions of the GNU operating system. I personally wish that when he heard of Linux he had gotten together with Linus and announced that Linux was GNU's first official kernel and the world now had a free operating system. Evidently no-one (including Linus) really expected the kernel to get as useful as it has and the GNU project wanted (among other things) portability to every hardware setup under the sun and a cooler design (hence the Hurd).
Daniel
Besides, it's possible to replace most of the GNU stuff in the OS (gcc is part of the OE), with BSD
tools - all of their stuff may eventually be replaced, so calling it GNU/Linux wouldn't be
futureproof.
Actually, if someone made a distro using the BSD tools, the argument for GNU/Linux would be even stronger because we'd have to tell it apart from BSD/Linux.
Daniel